Real Heroes

by Lawrence W. Reed

  Liberating the Individual

  The son of Scottish parents, Gladstone could speak Greek, Latin, Italian, and French as well as English. In 1832, at age twenty-two, he entered Parliament as a protectionist, a defender of the state-subsidized Church of England, an opponent of reform, and a protector of the status quo. The eminent British historian Thomas Babington Macauley described him as “the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories.”

  Words of Wisdom from William Ewart Gladstone

  “If the Government takes into its hands that which the man ought to do for himself it will inflict upon him greater mischiefs than all the benefits he will have received or all the advantages that would accrue from them.”

  By 1850 he had become an ardent free trader, and by 1890 he could look back proudly and take a substantial share of the credit for reducing Britain’s tariffs from 1,200 to just 12. As president of the Board of Trade in the ministry of Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s, a young Gladstone saw the disastrous Irish potato famine as a powerful argument against laws forbidding the importation of grain for a starving populace. Gladstone befriended the Anti–Corn Law League’s John Bright, became convinced of the logic of free trade, and secured the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws over the objections of many in his own Conservative or “Tory” Party. The measure split the Conservatives, which paved the way for Gladstone and others a decade later to found the Liberal Party.

  “Economy is the first and great article in my financial creed,” he wrote in 1859. During his four ministries, he slashed government spending, taxes, and regulations. He was attacked by statists for being miserly with the public’s money, but he said that any official not willing to save something even on “candle-ends and cheese-parings” was “not worth his salt.” He opposed the introduction of the income tax when it was first proposed in the 1840s and later tried to eliminate it when he was prime minister. In that noble effort he was unsuccessful, but he prevented the tax from becoming “progressive” and beat the rate down from a high of 10 percent to well under 2 percent.

  When London hosted the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Commission solicited proposals for a building to house the six-month public exhibition. The project was in danger of foundering amid designs deemed too costly when entrepreneur Joseph Paxton came forth with plans for a monster edifice made entirely of glass panes (nearly a quarter million of them) and the supporting iron framework. Paxton’s now-famous Crystal Palace was affordable only because Britain in 1845 had repealed its long-standing and onerous “window tax,” reducing the price of glass by 80 percent. Who had engineered the abolition of the window tax? None other than the tax-cutting William Ewart Gladstone.

  Gladstone also pushed through reforms that allowed Jews and Catholics to serve in Parliament and that extended the vote to millions of taxpaying workers who had previously been denied it. A devoutly religious man, he extolled the virtues of self-help and private charity. As prime minister, he often walked the streets of London (with no security detail) to find prostitutes to bring back to 10 Downing Street so he and his wife, Catherine, could talk them out of their unseemly occupation.

  Gladstone’s international reputation soared in 1851 when, after a visit to Naples, he revealed to the world the appalling conditions in Neapolitan prisons. Reformers there were being locked up for speaking out on behalf of freedom. Gladstone’s vigorous denunciation reverberated around the globe and later prompted the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi to credit the British parliamentarian with having “sounded the first trumpet call of Italian liberty.”

  Gladstone is remembered well in Ireland to this day because of his early efforts to grant more liberty to the Irish and to reform the vestiges of feudalism. He ended state subsidies for the Church of England in Ireland. He fought hard but failed to secure home rule for the Irish; had Parliament been as wise as he on that issue, Ireland today might still be a part of the United Kingdom.

  It wasn’t the instruction Gladstone received at Oxford that converted him to the liberation of the individual. He later observed:

  I trace in the education of Oxford of my own time one great defect. Perhaps it was my own fault; but I must admit that I did not learn when at Oxford that which I have learned since—namely, to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The temper which, I think, too much prevailed in academic circles was to regard liberty with jealousy.

  Anyone familiar with the prevailing orthodoxy of today’s academia would have to conclude that, in this respect, the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same.

  Replacing the Love of Power

  In foreign policy, with a painful exception or two that he came mostly to regret, Gladstone practiced nonintervention. He spoke against the Opium War with China as early as 1840. Decades later he opposed his rival Benjamin Disraeli’s imperialist policies, saying that he preferred the Golden Rule over adventurism and empire. He once opined, “Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.”

  Historian Jim Powell writes: “Gladstone believed the cost of war should be a deterrent to militarism. He insisted on a policy of financing war exclusively by taxation. He opposed borrowing money for war, since this would make it easier, and future generations would be unfairly burdened.”

  What a contrast to present times, when governments think nothing of spending more for programs at home at the same time they ratchet up military spending for wars abroad, then pile up the debt to cover it all in the short term.

  Gladstone firmly believed that the prospects for peace improve when the lust for power recedes. “We look forward to the time,” he once declared, “when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.”

  Liberty’s Champion

  Though he towered over everyone else in government in his day, including other classical liberals, Gladstone wasn’t perfect. Powell touches on one area where he fell: “Having matured in an era when his government had limited power and committed few horrors, Gladstone figured it could do some good. For instance, he approved taxes for government schools.” Perhaps the decision reflected the political pressure to spend some of the government revenues that soared after Gladstone had led the push to repeal tariffs and cut taxes.

  If the Grand Old Man could have seen where government involvement in education would lead, he might not have yielded on the matter. In my view, this is the only blemish on an otherwise sterling, decades-long career in defense of liberty. He may have sensed his error when he wrote in 1885: “The rule of our policy is that nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort; and I am not aware that, either in its moral or even its literary aspects, the work of the state for education has as yet proved its superiority to the work of the religious bodies or of philanthropic individuals.”

  In February 1893, in his eighty-third year, Gladstone delivered what one biographer terms “a lucid and brilliant speech” that upheld the sanctity of sound money and the gold standard. Honest men and honest governments don’t steal from the people by debasing the currency, Gladstone said. He urged the British people to look to the ideas of America’s Founding Fathers for inspiration. The more he reflected on the wisdom of men like Madison and Jefferson, the more he saw them as political and intellectual giants.

  In warning against the temptations to grow the size and scope of the state, Gladstone was positively prophetic:

  But let the working man be on his guard against another danger. We live at a time when there is a disposition to think that the Government ought to do this and that and that the Government ought to do everything. There are things which the Government ought to do, I have no doubt. In former periods the Government have neglected much, and possibly even now they neglect something; but there is a danger on the other side. If the Government takes into its hands that which the man ought to do for himself it will inflict upon him greater mischiefs than all the benefits he w
ill have received or all the advantages that would accrue from them.

  This was a man who embraced activist government in his youth but learned quickly what a snare and a delusion it could be, then set himself on a course to fight it.

  “I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty; I learned to believe in it,” he told a friend in 1891. “I view with the greatest alarm the progress of socialism at the present day,” he said. “Whatever influence I possess will be used in the direction of stopping it.”

  We who love liberty often think poorly of politicians. William Ewart Gladstone, however, was one we can embrace as a champion.

  Lessons from William Ewart Gladstone

  Fight for liberty on many fronts: Gladstone championed free trade, sound money, low taxes, and private property; denounced the idea that “the Government ought to do everything”; fought for religious liberty and Irish home rule; and resisted foreign adventurism.

  Question the prevailing orthodoxy in academia: At Oxford, Gladstone encountered a problem that many students face today: a widespread tendency “to regard liberty with jealousy.”

  15

  George Eastman

  Genius of Invention and Enterprise

  In 2015 a new world record was set: humans recorded fleeting moments of their lives at least one trillion times. That’s how many photos we snapped over the course of the year, up from 810 billion in 2014, according to InfoTrends’ Worldwide Image Capture Forecast. About three-quarters of them were taken with smartphones, which didn’t even exist a couple of decades ago.

  Giants in the field of photography have enriched our lives far beyond the imaginations of the first few generations of Americans. Although the first photographic process—called daguerreotype—was introduced commercially in 1839, decades of innovation and investment followed before picture taking was inexpensive enough to make it a national pastime. More than anyone else, the man who ushered in the era of modern photography was George Eastman.

  Eastman introduced the Kodak “Brownie” box camera in February 1900. The price tag was one dollar; film sold for fifteen cents a roll. Eastman did for cameras what Steve Jobs would do for computers almost eight decades later: put exciting new technology within the reach of almost every American family.

  “Kodak Freaks”

  Whether you’re a camera buff or not, you probably have seen a Brownie. Nowadays these cameras show up at rummage sales and antique shows, but I can remember when they were still widely used in my childhood during the 1950s. They were simple to operate and took great pictures. I would snap a roll of fewer than twenty photos, reel them back onto the original spool, remove the spool from the camera, and give it to my father. He would drop it off at the camera store on his way to work. A full week of anxious waiting later, my photos would be ready for pickup.

  The Brownie was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Millions were sold. Thousands of American youngsters signed up as members of the Brownie Camera Club and entered Kodak photo contests. Famous photographers got their start with Eastman’s invention.

  In 1871, at the age of seventeen, Eastman bought almost a hundred dollars’ worth of photographic equipment and hired a photographer to instruct him in the art. He read everything he could find on the subject and began hauling his equipment everywhere to capture images.

  Hauling is the appropriate term. Cameras in the 1870s were as big as microwave ovens are now. The tools of the professional photographer’s trade—including a bulky, unreliable camera, a tripod, and various liquid chemicals—were more than a single man could carry, “a pack-horse load,” as Eastman described it. He resolved to downsize, simplify, and reduce the burden of taking pictures.

  Eastman experimented endlessly and discovered new techniques and processes for producing better film and lighter, less expensive cameras. A self-taught chemist, he ended the era of sloppy, wet-plate photography by inventing a process that used dry chemicals, though not without many disappointments along the way. His Eastman Dry Plate Company almost went bankrupt in the 1880s. But in America’s golden age of invention—when taxes were low, rewards for persistence were often great, and government largely left creative people alone—this genius who had dropped out of school at age thirteen built an extraordinarily successful business.

  Words of Wisdom from George Eastman

  “What we do during our working hours determines what we have in the world; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.”

  Professional photographers praised Eastman’s pioneering work. They called his prints and negatives “the best dry plate work on the market.” Journals and newspapers began publishing articles about each Eastman invention and eagerly awaited the next one.

  By 1888 Eastman had simplified the camera into a small, easily held box measuring three and three-quarter inches high, three and a quarter inches wide, and six and a half inches long. He needed a name for it, a catchy trademark that could be easily pronounced and spelled. “K” was his favorite letter because, he said, it was “a strong, incisive sort of letter.” After toying with various combinations of letters, he hit on one that rang some sort of bell in his mind: “Kodak.”

  In 1892 Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York, the first company to mass produce standardized photography equipment. It also manufactured the flexible transparent film, which proved indispensable to the development of the motion picture industry.

  But the first Kodak camera, priced at twenty-five dollars, was still unaffordable for most Americans. Eastman and his team of expert craftsmen worked feverishly to cut costs and improve quality. The result was the Kodak Brownie, a camera that would reach people, in Eastman’s words, “the same way the bicycle has reached them.”

  The Brownie took the world by storm. The first run of five thousand cameras flew off the shelves, and orders piled up at a pace that exceeded the most optimistic projections. Even corner drugstores were selling them.

  A new term was coined during a 1905 court trial to describe the millions of people caught up in the craze: “Kodak freaks.” In her biography of George Eastman, Elizabeth Brayer quotes the court transcript, which read, “Wherever they go, and whomever they see, and whatever place they have come to, they have got to have a Kodak along for the purpose of getting pictures.” In 1904, reports Brayer, when the Dalai Lama fled from his Tibetan palace, he took his Brownie with him.

  Inventor, Business Leader, Philanthropist

  George Eastman was not only a talented inventor but also a superb businessman. He inspired great loyalty among his employees, in large measure because of what Brayer calls “his countless acts of kindness, his enlightened personnel policies, and his tireless working habits.”

  This self-made man became one of America’s wealthiest citizens and most generous philanthropists. During his lifetime he gave away, usually without fanfare, what today would amount to more than $100 million. He gave the equivalent of $20 million to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology and millions more to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eastman’s giving was a huge financial help to some historically black colleges in the South, including Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.

  Of course, what he gave away didn’t make him a hero. That was the easy part. He had to earn a fortune first by serving billions of eager consumers who benefited from his vision and abilities over the decades.

  No central planner could have foreseen what Eastman achieved in his time, or what his successors have since achieved in ours. In 2015 the number of cell phones in the world exceeded the earth’s population for the first time, and about half of those phones had built-in cameras. Smartphones equipped with high-quality cameras are easily one of the fastest-growing consumer technology marvels in history, and they are direct descendants of the innovations Eastman was responsible for in the nineteenth century. Like Eastman’s products, these smartphones improve in quality with every new release—photo resolution has increased exponentially since the first camera phone wen
t on sale in 1996—and prices continue to drop. These developments are tributes to the spontaneous order of a relatively free, entrepreneurial marketplace, unplanned by politicians or bureaucrats. They didn’t require a government venture-capital fund, taxpayer-funded subsidies, or job-training grants—only an environment of low taxes, minimal regulation, and freewheeling risk taking by inventors and marketers.

  Wealthy citizens played key roles in this story. They were the prime sources of capital to launch inventions like cameras and phones, and they were the ones who could afford to buy the early versions. Those purchases helped cover the initial high costs and enormous risks.

  The same is true for almost every other invention. Wealthy people bought the first cameras when they sold for hundreds of nineteenth-century dollars, helping to provide the income and the capital for people like George Eastman to figure out how to cut their price to a comparative pittance.

  I’m thankful that these benefactors of humanity never had to pay the 90 percent marginal income tax rate that some would like to reimpose today.

  “My Work Is Done”

  Eastman’s final two years were arduous and painful. Suffering from a degenerative spinal condition, he found it increasingly difficult to stand or walk. On March 14, 1932, at age seventy-seven, he took his own life by way of a single gunshot to the heart. He left a note that read, “To my friends, my work is done. Why wait?—GE.”

  Successful geniuses of capital and enterprise like George Eastman are viewed with disdain by many in our midst. These critics are the envious, the demagogues, the class warriors, the power lusters, the people who are more eager to steal and redistribute what others create than to bake a bigger pie. The Eastmans of the world, however, will go on bequeathing great gifts to humanity while their detractors, with a little luck, will be forgotten.